


these fragments

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: Thor Works [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Infinity War spoilers, Post Infinity War, Time Travel, fixit fic, implied Valkyrie/Thor/Loki, post thor ragnarok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 14:44:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14499279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “Someone has to survive this day,” Thor grinds out, pressed briefly close to her by the fight.“Someone will,” she tells him.





	these fragments

**Author's Note:**

> uh, so, having delved into the tag and realizing that EVERY thor ragnarok fic is titled "rebuild all your ruins", because stealing from the manifesto of the movie song is....less than wholly original, here's a new title. 
> 
> Stolen from Eliot, this time, since it's thematically the same deal: These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

1.

“Don’t you want to come home?” the king’s son asks her.

“Not really,” she tells him.

 

14.

She realizes half the universe has been well and truly fucked when Korg crumbles into ash and earth in front of her, and then the baby he’d pushed into her arms gasps and crumbles away too.

The cult of Thanos claims credit, nervously victorious, although their numbers have been halved as well. The entire goddamn universe is in mourning. Everyone’s a refugee, and everywhere is chaos, which means it hardly matters that Asgard was already fucked--half the populace killed by Hela, the survivors halved again by Thanos’s army, and then those survivors culled _again_ by his magic--

 _Asgard is a people_ , Heimdall said, but there are a ragged handful of Asgardians left in the entire universe.

Asgard is dead, she tells those who are left, and leaves them to whatever funeral they want to have. She’s done with mourning. Been done with it for years.

 

2.

The king’s daughter slaughtered her sisters, and killed Ragnhild right before her eyes. She shuddered awake in the wreckage of everything she loved, and found the king had shut his daughter up in a prison, and declared the Valkyries lost. She swore she would never again kill for Asgard, much less die for it.

She breaks that promise a mere thousand years later, because the king’s oldest son--weak and ridiculous--asks her if she wants to come home, and the king’s youngest son--sly and cowardly--reminds her of all the reasons she has to say yes.

“What’s your name?” the king’s son asks her, when she first agrees to the alliance.

“She’s the last Valkyrie,” the younger son says before she can answer, giving her a poisonous look. She’s tied him to a chair, so she takes no offense. “What would she need a name for?”

It has the weight of a prophecy, which makes her sneer. She gave up her name a very long time ago, and not for him.

“Call me whatever the hell you want,” she says, and jerks her chin at the window. “How are we getting you out of here?”

Both the king’s sons smile, briefly, as if they can’t help themselves.

 

7.

“Get the children to the escape pods,” Thor orders as soon as it becomes clear that they are not going to be able to hold them off, looking as noble and golden as Odin before him. She goes, and spends precious minutes shoving as many ragged and traumatized civilians as she can into the life rafts. Too many of them want to stay and fight, poor bastards. There’s only so many times you can run away from a home. “Die if you want to,” she snaps at one particularly angry farmer, and puts a blaster in his hand. “Just get the kids out first.”

When the first row of rafts are loose, with instructions to scatter into the current and keep the engines cold for as long as possible, and the second row are loading up, she turns her duty over to the fear-pale farmer and runs back up to the main deck, where she supposes she’ll die at her fucking king’s right hand after all.

“I told you to go!” Thor calls to her from the midst of the battle. They are killing hundreds of the aliens now, strange fanged creatures she doesn’t recognize piling up on the deck, becoming the new battleground. Thor the king crackles with lightning, there are dozens of Lokis throwing ice knives into the fray, Heimdall hews down dozens with his sword, the Hulk roars on the deck below, and she fights like she faced Hela herself again. But their enemies do not stop coming, and their lieutenants fight like gods.

“I did what you asked,” she calls back, and finds a spare second to grin at him. “And then I came back.”

“Someone has to survive this day,” Thor grinds out, pressed briefly close to her by the fight.

“Someone will,” she tells him, just as a fresh horde pours in through the gap torn in their hull.

She’s not sure how many she more she kills--one hundred? Two hundred?--when one of them gets its teeth in her throat, and the world starts going dark.

 

4.

Loki can conjure liquor out of the air, reaching one slim hand into nothingness and returning with a flask of absolutely beautiful Xandarian ale.

“I see your purpose now,” she tells him, and takes the flask away from him.

 

3.

Loki emerges from Thor’s quarters at first bell on the second day, although no one saw him board the ship.

“Thought he was burnt to a crisp,” she remarks to the All-Seeing, who appears to be the only other survivor over two thousand years old. They are alone on a ship full of children, and there’s not enough liquor in the Grandmaster’s stores to take the edge off. “But you don’t seem surprised.”

Heimdall shrugs. “He is hidden to my sight,” he says. “But I would not believe Loki Liesmith dead unless I lit the pyre with my own hands.”

Valkyrie looks at the king and his heir, availing themselves of the replicators across the deck. One-eyed Thor misjudges the distance between his cup and his mouth, and yelps as he spills coffee down his front. He laughs at himself, and Loki rolls his eyes. A little green thread of magic tugs the cup from Thor’s hand, and Loki fills it again, and drinks from it.

“Good,” she tells Heimdall. There are worse things than an heir that will never die, and a king that most certainly will. “Assuming there isn’t a yellow-haired bastard tucked away somewhere who’s gonna come and claim the throne someday.”

“Frigga protect us,” Heimdall says drily.

  
15.

She’s not sure which bar this is--or if she’s still on Xandar, really--but they haven’t kicked her out yet, and that’s really all the information she needs right now.

She flinches when she feels the touch on her shoulder. “Not interested,” she grinds out, only when she opens her eyes she sees that it’s a tiny human with her hand on Valkyrie’s shoulder, as petite and delicate as a doll, with a heavy sheet of brown hair. “Maybe I’m interested,” she amends, and resettles herself on her elbows.

“Are you the last Valkyrie?” the woman asks, urgent.

Valkyrie groans.

“You are,” the woman says, and grips Valkryie’s arm with one tiny hand. The heavy iron necklace she wears starts to glow pink. “You have to come with me.”

Valkyrie starts to slam the woman’s hand to the table, but the world abruptly falls away, leaving nothing behind but the woman and a dizzying channel of rainbow light. Valkyrie hangs onto her hand for dear life, and the woman grips her back, hard.

When the light releases her, she falls onto her knees and vomits onto the floor. It’s only partially the drink.

“Oh my god,” a girl says from somewhere over Valkyrie’s head, sounding horrified and very young. “Some of that splashed on my shoes. Foster! You brought me an alien who pukes on my shoes.”

“That was seiðr,” Valkyrie rasps, and wipes her mouth. She looks up--the woman who kidnapped her is still only a breath away. A silent woman with a bare skull and a severe expression is standing protectively in front of the girl, who is busy taking off her sandals. “Which one of you is the witch?” she demands.

“No one here is a witch,” the kidnapper says, at the exact same time as the girl answers “she is.”

Valkyrie staggers to her feet, and the bare-skulled woman takes a step forward, hefting a spear--where did the spear come from? She shakes her head, trying to clear the haze from it.

“Stop,” the kidnapper says firmly. “Miss, uh, Valkyrie. That’s Shuri, the queen of Wakanda, and I’m Jane Foster.” She says this as if Valkyrie might recognize it. Valkyrie stares at her without blinking.

“And my general, Okoye,” the girl says, now successfully barefoot, which means she is the queen. She looks barely old enough to be out of a nursery.

“We need your help,” Jane Foster tells her.

“Too bad,” Valkyrie says. “I’m out of the helping people business.”

Then the girl queen tells her the plan.

It’s a terrible plan.

Norns help her, Valkyrie likes it.

 

5.

Later, of course, she ends up dead drunk in her quarters with the Liesmith and his endless supply of liquor, which he confesses he actually stole from the cabinet of the Sovereign empress years ago, and has since secreted away in a pocket dimension. He turns out to be surprisingly pleasant company, when they are both mellowed by ale and the hour.

“This would be so much better cold,” Valkyrie says sadly, staring down at her fire wine.

“The way they serve it on Vanaheim?” Loki asks, and makes a little gesture with his hands, from where he’s sprawled out on her floor. “With the snow pearls?”

“Fussy,” Valkyrie says with disapproval, and tops up her glass. “Just cold.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Loki says, and rolls up onto his knees, leaning forward onto the edge of the bed until he can rest the tip of one finger against the glass. A white frost spreads out from his finger, and she realizes in shock that the color has leached out of his entire hand, leaving it an unmistakable alien blue.

She yanks her glass back, and he blinks at her. “You’re a frost giant,” she says.

“You didn’t know,” he says, blinking at her slowly. “You don’t know anything about me.” He gives a soft, bitter laugh. “That’s new.”

“I know some things,” Valkyrie says, and gives him a malicious smile. “We had gossip on Sakaar, too.”

The tips of his ears turn red.

“How much of it is true?” she asks, with a long, deliberate look at him.

“How much would you like to be true?” he asks sultrily, clearly hoping that she only heard the stories about mid-orgy gender adjustment and not the one about the octopus costume.

She stares at him until it is crystal clear that she heard everything, and the flush has spread down to his neck, and then she drains her glass and sets it on the floor. When she touches Loki’s neck, braced for the cold, Loki sucks in a breath and becomes a girl under her hand, with a plush mouth, a soft throat, and curves Valkyrie is going to enjoy investigating.

“I can be whatever you like,” Loki says, with some of her bravado back.

Valkyrie pushes back Loki’s hair with her thumb, so it settles behind her ear. She leans in, and Loki’s eyes darken agreeably. “We heard about the eight-legged horse on the lower levels, too,” she whispers in Loki’s ear, and laughs when Loki winces.

 

10.

She wakes, when she expects never to wake again, because she is in pain.

She’s still lying on the field of battle, but someone has his fingers in the wound at her throat, which is why it’s such goddamn agony.

“We’ve lost enough,” Loki mutters over her head in a vicious whisper. She can feel the seiðr flowing into her, an icy surge in her veins. “The library, the vault, the histories. We’re not losing the last fucking Valkyrie.”  
  
Somewhere near, a man is shouting that they should be glad to die for Thanos.

She opens her eyes briefly, sees Loki scowl down at her, and then sends a double walking out of the shadows.

“Sleep,” he whispers, and she sleeps.  


16.

Jane Foster is a witch, and Queen Shuri as well. They have crafted a time machine out of, as far as Valkyrie can tell, scraps and spiderwebs and hope.

“We’re trying to save my brother,” the queen says, the childlike words at odds with the serene determination on her face. “The rightful king of Wakanda.” She smiles at Valkyrie. “And the only way to do that is to save the universe.”

  
Their plan is to send Valkyrie back in time and have her locate and destroy the tesseract before Thanos could steal it, thereby preventing him from achieving his plan.

“It has to be you,” Foster says with too much patience, as though Valkyrie were a child and not her many-times elder, “because we can’t send anyone physically back--but we can create a mental loop, so your consciousness now possesses your body then.”

“Which will create a parallel universe,” the queen adds, “and then hopefully your actions will create a _third_ parallel universe, thereby wiping out this one.”  
  
Valkyrie cracks her knuckles, stretches her arms. “Not a problem,” she says. “Done it before.” Time travel was a pastime on Vanaheim, once.

To be totally honest, she expects it to impress them, but they both look troubled.

“What?” she asks.

“That’s what Thor said,” Foster says quietly, which is how Valkyrie learns that her king was not dead when she saw him drifting in the void. “We sent him back two weeks ago. We still don’t know what went wrong.”

“But if he succeeded, we wouldn’t know we’d sent him in the first place,” the queen says, fidgeting with a little mechanical toy. “So we must assume his greasy-haired brother refused to give it up.” She looks up from the toy, serious again. “You weren’t our second choice either, Last Valkyrie. We sent Bruce Banner back last week.” She lets that sit, then continues: “It’s not enough to hide it somewhere safe, or protect it. It has to be destroyed. That could be where Thor failed.” And then she hands the toy over, and explains that it is her best guess at destroying an infinity stone, without the use of another infinity stone. “Don’t stand close to it when it goes off,” the queen advises.

Valkyrie will kill herself a hundred times over if it stops this future coming to pass. Ragnarok visited upon her world three times.

“You might be disoriented at first,” Foster says, before handing over the time travel device. “Your time sense might be warped, or it might take a while for your new memories to kick in. We’re not even sure how far back you’ll be sent.”

“I’ll deal with that when it comes to it,” Valkyrie says easily, and snatches the device, stuffing the tesseract-killer in her belt.

“No offense,” the queen says, “but I hope we never see you again.”

“None taken,” Valkyrie says.  


6.

She’s wrist-deep in Loki’s cunt when the alarm goes off, the shock of it sending Loki into gasping convulsions around her hand, which means there really isn’t time to get cleaned up before running to the bridge. Loki doesn’t even get out of bed--she sends a double up with Valkyrie instead, which is naturally in perfect order.

The alarm doesn’t turn out to be anything--pirates, thinking this really is a generation ship, frightened off by the first sentence in Asgardian. Thor, however, looks between Valkyrie and his cool, impassive sister, and gets comically wide-eyed.

Valkyrie deliberately sucks her thumb clean with a pop. “Problem?”

He holds up both his hands. “No problem,” he says. Then he flicks a coin at Loki, and bursts out laughing when it passes right through her.

“She played the same trick when we were boys,” Thor says, still smiling. He claps her on the shoulder and leaves her alone with Loki, who looks disgruntled as a cat.  


13.

She wakes to the sound of the alarm, still in the field of bodies, and touches her hand to her throat--she’s healed. She struggles to her feet, and realizes in cold horror that she’s the only one standing. The only people left are the dead. She picks her way through them, hoping to find survivors, but there are none. She steps over Heimdall, and shudders. As she rounds the corner, she sees the reason for the alarm: there’s an enormous hole blown in the side of their hull. The shields have covered it thus far, but they’re visibly flickering. She dives for a control panel, and as she seals off the rest of the ship, she hears a muffled sound.

There’s just enough time for her to turn around and see that Thor is still alive, trapped under a twisted heap of metal, before the room empties, and all the bodies flood out into space.

It takes her precious minutes to find a suit and clip herself to the hull, and many more minutes of searching through the dead before she sees him, far enough away that she can’t reach him on her line. By then it’s been long enough that she doesn’t have any hope he’s still alive. She gives a grim nod to the body of the King of Asgard, and reels herself back in.  
When she’s nearly at the breach, another body drifts against her. Loki, with a broken neck.

She reels herself the rest of the way in. The last life rafts haven’t left yet. She stumbles into the last one, and closes her eyes.  


7.

Thor is teaching the children how to fight, and she is watching, occasionally shouting unhelpful pieces of criticism.

Banner comes to sit by her side. “Weird, huh?” he says, nodding at Thor. “One minute he’s all, you know, over the place. And the next it’s like he’s--Barack Obama.”

“Who is Barack Obama?” she asks absently.

“A good ruler,” Banner says, and then makes a face. “Or he seemed like a good ruler three years ago. I guess anything could have happened since then.”

Thor dramatically collapses onto the floor of the deck when a little girl makes a passable attack, to demonstrate its efficacy. There are screams of laughter in response, so who knows if the lesson stuck. “He’ll do,” Valkyrie says.

They watch for a while longer, until Loki comes and leans against the door frame. Bruce’s face hardens. She’s been told, by now, about Loki’s failed conquests on Earth and Jotunheim. It’s ugly, no doubt about it. But she was a slaver six months ago.

Coming home changes a person sometimes, she thinks, and then, for reasons she doesn’t fully understand, she says it out loud.

Thor gives her a curious glance. She doesn’t turn to look at Loki, but she can feel him looking at her.  


8.

“How does it work?” she asks idly, as Loki draws a cloth out of the air rather than get out of bed to grab one across the room, passing it shakily over his stomach. “The pocket dimension, I mean.”

“More or less as it sounds,” Loki says, still out of breath, and practically glowing with satisfaction. She’s justifiably smug. “It’s like a cupboard in the space/time continuum. I just reach my hand in where I expect to find something, and there it is.”

She shakes her head. “Witches,” she says. “You always overcomplicate things.”

“Not _always_ , I hope,” he says, and runs a fingertip over the harness at her hips.

“Open it up,” she says abruptly.

He blinks at her. “What?”

“Your magic cupboard. I want to see.”

“It’s just a cupboard,” he says.

“Show me,” she says, and wishes she could remember why it feels urgent.

He tilts his head to the side, studying her warily. “I don’t think you’d like it if I gave you all my secrets,” he says. “Is it important?”

She considers. “I think it might be very fucking important,” she says.

Loki looks at her for another careful beat, and she thinks he’s going to refuse. “Just this once,” he says, still reluctant. Then he snaps his fingers, and a little window opens up out of the air.

She plunges her arm in, thinks _tesseract_ , and feels something small and cool land in her palm. She remembers that the plan was _detonate the bomb inside the pocket dimension,_ but now her mind is clear, and she knows that Loki’s cupboard contains the last treasures of their home, the last books from an Asgardian library, and instead she yanks out a small blue box that contains the entire fate of the goddamn universe, and her memories flood back all at once. 

9.

It takes Thor, Heimdall, and the threat of the Hulk to convince Loki to hear her out, much less agree to destroy an infinity stone, but by the time she finishes her story Thor has gone white as a sheet, and Banner actually sways where he stands. “It’s true,” Thor says, looking blown wide open, so much so that she’s uncomfortable looking at him. “Everything she says.”

“Yeah,” Banner says, and clutches, oddly, at his own chest. “Yeah, that’s. That’s what happened. Happens. Is happening, oh god. All those people.”

“We’ve got a problem,” she says grimly. “After I destroy it, Thanos is still coming here to find it.”

“And we can’t face him,” Thor says immediately. “He’s more powerful than any of us, and he has an army.”

“We should evacuate now,” Banner begins, but Heimdall is already shaking his head.

“He’s got his eye on us,” Heimdall says. “He won’t stop coming so long as he thinks we have the stone.”

“So we let him come,” Loki says. When they all turn to look at him, he holds up the bomb the girl queen gave her. She gropes automatically for it at her belt, and he waves her protest wordlessly away. “This is rather good,” he says. “For human make. If we time the detonation with the arrival of Thanos’s ship--”

“--we convince him we really don’t have the stone anymore,” Heimdall realizes.

“And we blow a big hole in his ship at the same time,” Thor says, grinning fiercely.

“Not to mention blowing a big hole in the original universe,” Banner adds.

Loki looks at her, waiting.

She shrugs, trying vainly to pretend like her heart isn’t as glad and hungry as her king’s. “I like any plan that lets me fire a cannon at Thanos.”

“Then we’re agreed,” Thor says, and holds out his hand for the bomb. After a brief pause, Loki drops it in his palm.  


10.

They fire a bomb at the universe, and an infinity stone shatters. They also blow a big hole in Thanos’s ship. She stands for a while watching it burn with the King and his heir.

“This isn’t the end of him,” Thor says heavily. “He may still achieve the time stone from the wizard Strange. If so, he could undo this with a snap of his fingers.”

“It isn’t the end of him,” Loki agrees, “but nor is it the end of us. Surely that’s what matters, today.”

Thor abruptly grabs his brother’s head, and presses a firm kiss to his brow. “You’re right,” he says, and while Valkyrie is grinning at the expression on Loki’s face, she’s given the exact same treatment. “You saved us, Sigyn,” he says, gently letting her go. “Asgard is in your debt.”

She stares at him, her eyes wide. It’s been a thousand years, at least, since she heard that name.

“Please,” Loki says, haughtily. “You’re the last Valkyrie. You think we never looked you up?”

She punches him in the shoulder, and Loki rubs his arm, offended, but doesn’t leave.

“Thanks,” she tells her king. “You can pay me back by killing the ugly bastard.”

“My pleasure,” Thor says, and leaves her with Loki, so he can steer the ship that is all of Asgard in the direction of somewhere safe.

“I think I might love your brother,” she says after a minute.

Loki sighs. “Don’t we all,” he replies.  


17.

“I know you don’t care,” Foster says, clear and insistent. “But you need to know. There’s a chance that this could mess with your time sense permanently. We don’t know what the effects are. You could be--unstuck in time, forever. Or you might never be able to trust your reality again.”

“You’re right,” Valkyrie says. “I don’t care.”

A little smile flickers at the corner of Foster’s mouth. “Then I guess you’ll be fine,” she says. She keys in the code that will activate the device. “Go save the universe.”

Valkyrie closes her eyes, and steps forward into time.

  
1.

“Don’t you want to come home?” the king’s son asks her.

“Yes,” she tells him.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know it's Brunnhilde in the comics. No, I don't care. Thanks! 
> 
> Feedback is loved. :)


End file.
